I was in the same boat than you recently and have been working on a 2012 Macbook Pro that was easily repairable (I changed the keyboard two times, as well as the trackpad once). The biggest problem for me was only having 8 Gigs of RAM (not upgradable), the fact that I went with just 256GB of hard drive space in the first place and the comparably weak processor today - six years after the machine was released. The machine had every port I could've wished for, so I could do without any dongles (a huge disadvantage of the new Macbooks, imo).
However, working with Adobe software, post-processing large images or creating huge layouts was a real drag. I saw the beachball and the "your hard drive is almost full" warning way too often recently, it just drove me crazy and sometimes even led to crashes and me loosing data.
Since my machine was good for basically half a decade, I went all in and got an almost maxed out 2018 MBP (2TB hard drive, the rest is maxed out). I don't have any comparison to 2016 or 2017 models, of course, but I can tell you that my work efficiency has at least gained 50%. Everything just flies, I don't have to wait more than split seconds for apps to open, can smoothly edit 4k H.265 video without creating any proxy media if I play it back as optimized media in FCP X, can browse large Lightroom libraries without any problems and saving a huge file in Photoshop doesn't want me to put the kettle on and brew a nice cuppa any longer. If there aren't any hardware faults coming my way, I have a feeling that the machine will again last me for many years to come. I plan to get Apple Care towards the end of the first year, just to be on the safe side.
Just my two cents
There are probably Windows machines out there with the same or better performance at a cheaper price if you're willing to accept having to deal with Windows and usually worse customer service than Apple's.
